WHAT KILLED OUR SEQUENCE OF RELIGIONS?
–“Paganism was killed by philosophy, paganism represents human whim and emotions”–@VRfutureop
And;
–“Organized religions killed disorganized (unsystematic religions”–(CD)
And;
–“I would say in a similar, way science killed Christianity, or at least weakened it to a point where it can be replaced by some even more abstract alternative.”–@NeoPV_
Technically, while overly pejorative, this is a good argument. In other words, philosophy is systematic, and idiosyncratically evolved distributed mythology is at best metaphysically consistent, but not sufficient for deduction, discussion, debate, argument. In other words unsystematic religion can’t survive competition and scale.
That doesn’t mean that a natural religion for an ethnicity in a geography isn’t possible, just that it would need to be somehow consistent. And I’m pretty sure that’s possible to constitute. Not really difficult at all. And easily instituted.
IMO, despite that Aquinas synthesized the ancient world with the high medieval restoration of Classical Knowledge in to the natural law, but still unfortunately dependent upon divine causality, and then the scholastics and then the church adopted and promoted natural law.
Unfortunately the Catholic Church, despite it’s history of thought leaders, it’s accumulation of dogma, and justification for natural law, failed to produce a reformer in response to Darwin, Maxwell, Menger, Spencer, Nietzsche and the rest who explained the natural world as absent requirement for intentional design and management.
It should produced an obvious reform that only required the Church to claim ignorance and impossibility of knowing whether God created the laws of the universe from outside the universe, or whether God is the universe, or God is a product of the universe – because regardless of his mode of existence, the evidence of his laws both physical, behavioral and evolutionary, is the same.
As such we know the word of God.
So the church could have claimed victory, stating that in christian forgiveness and in natural law, the church had discovered the evidence of the laws of god – not the words produced by man inspired by them, and as such the church was correct and thus the most successful and ‘right’ religion.
Now oddly enough, we can defend this argument against all comers. 😉 Because it makes no false assertions or assumptions, and instead discredits those who try.
All it requires is yet another anthropomorphism as a means of saying we do know now the answer. Which is the basis of all myth, philosophy, and science: reduction of the unknown to an analogy to human experience. 😉
Affections.
CD
Reply addressees: @NeoPV_ @VRfutureop